The Aftermath -- One Shot
by Shakespoe
Summary: This story takes a dive into Arizona's psyche as she tries to rebuild herself through season 9. SPOILERS. One shot.


I found this while looking through my old stories and I absolutely loved it, so I decided to go ahead and share it. It sums up season 9 for Arizona in one quick swoop. It takes a look into her psyche as she tries to rebuild herself after the plane crash. Also - if you haven't seen season 9, there *are* spoilers. So tread carefully, my dears ;)

I hope you like it!

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When I got on that plane, I had no idea that my life was going to change forever; I wish nothing more than to be able to reverse time and jump back into that instant of blissful ignorance. Where my life was whole; where I was whole.

I didn't let myself feel anything during the days we were left alone in the forest. I started to panic when I saw my leg for the first time, but all I could hear in the back of my head was my father's voice telling me to be a good man in a storm. And then I heard the pilot's voice and I knew I had to be strong; I had to be strong for him and for everyone else who was on that plane. After Lexi died, Mark needed me. He needed me to be strong, to be that good man in a storm. But as soon as I knew that we were safe, that we were finally home, all I wanted was to see my wife, my Calliope.

I needed the hope, the belief that my life wasn't about to be flipped in on itself, that my life as I knew it wasn't going to be ending. My wife was the top orthopedic surgeon in the country. I'd watched her rebuild legs, make men walk; I knew she could fix me. I had to believe that.

When she started to tell me that the infection wasn't going away, that there wasn't a plan, I couldn't take it. That hope was being crushed and it was the only thing I could hang on to, it was the only emotion my body had the ability to grasp. So I made her promise. I made her promise me that they wouldn't take my leg.

The part of me that was Dr. Arizona Robbins, M.D. knew that that was a promise a doctor could never make. We're taught that all throughout school and we learn it over and over again after every patient we lose. We can't promise what we can't control, all we can say is that we will try our best, and then we do.

But the part of me that was Arizona Robbins, the woman terrified to lose everything in the life she had come to love, **that** part of me needed my wife to promise the impossible to me. And she did. But in that promise, my brain stopped hearing Calliope Torres, my wife, and instead heard Dr. Calliope Torres, M.D. make a promise that I would still have my leg.

And that's where it all went wrong.

I trusted her, and I put every ounce of my being into that promise and when I woke up without a leg, that hope disappeared. Suddenly, there was nothing left inside of me.

Numb. Everything went numb. I couldn't feel anything.

It wasn't that I necessarily felt _sad_ even, like they tell you depressed people feel. It wasn't that. I didn't feel sad, or angry, or happy, or dark, or anything. I felt **nothing**.

How do you explain to someone that you just don't feel anything?

Callie came to me and tried so many times to make me hear her, but I couldn't hear anything she said. All I could hear was the empty promise she made and then immediately broke. That hope was everything. My leg was gone, and with it, every emotion my body had left. I was living with an empty soul; an existence that made death seem easy.

My baby would cry, but I didn't feel it.

My wife would yell, scream, beg for me to come back to her, but I didn't feel it.

Suddenly my whole life felt like a phantom existence.

Then one day, Callie stormed into my room and screamed at me to snap out of it, to come back to her because she needed me and Sofia needed me. I knew that… didn't she know that I **knew that!?** And then, something happened. Something snapped and my blood flew through my veins. My heart that I didn't realize was still there sputtered into overdrive. The hair all over my body stood up on end and suddenly I was screaming back. I don't remember the words; they came so quickly to me. My brain was on fire. The words raced through my throat and out of my mouth faster than I had time to process them. I could see hurt traced across Callie's face but all I knew was that in that moment I had finally _felt_ something: Anger.

Anger was easy; it came quickly and rushed through my body. It reminded me that I was actually alive. So, for weeks, I was angry; it was fast, it was exhilarating, and it made me feel like part of me still existed.

And then Bailey tricked me into coming back to the hospital. I knew that she was trying to get me back to work; everyone was trying to get me **back**. What I couldn't figure out was how to come back. I sometimes felt like there was nothing left of the Arizona from before. But I knew that the only way to keep building myself up from the ashes was to find ways to move on from just being angry. So, I dived into my work and that helped.

I had my first surgery, which I thought might be able to bring some feelings of accomplishment or confidence, but it was just more of the same. Not even the surgery brought me back to feeling like myself. The surgery simply started, it went, and it ended. I backed away from the table and then I went to put weight on my left foot, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor.

I vaguely heard Karev's voice yelling at everyone to get out of the OR somewhere in the distance. But in that moment, all I saw was the cold, hard floor spread out in front of me without a single speck of dust, all because I tried to put my weight on a foot I didn't even have! And for some reason, that was hysterical to me. Something snapped again and it was like all of the happiness my mind had ever felt came barreling out of me in this uproar of laughter. Karev helped me up, completely and utterly confused as to why I was laughing. I tried to explain to him how I had put my weight on a foot I didn't even have and how that was just out of this world hilarious to me, but he didn't seem to get it. So, I laughed to myself and I just couldn't stop. My brain had figured out another new emotion: Happiness.

After happiness and anger, came more complex emotions: confidence, accomplishment, self-consciousness, fear, and anxiety. They were each more and more difficult to handle, as my psyche learned how to manipulate and store each new feeling. It was hard, this building myself back into a whole person business. The new prosthetic helped, and being able to walk without a cane was definitely a good thing. It's always nice to be able to differentiate yourself from the members of the geriatrics wing.

And then, Callie snapped at me before Bailey's wedding. I had spent so much time focusing on learning all of these new emotions again, that I hadn't even noticed or realized that Callie was …frustrated. When she blurted out to me that she was tired of hearing about my damn leg and that she hadn't had sex in months because of my leg, I realized that there was another part of me that hadn't rematerialized yet. My wife needed me, and I hadn't even realized it. So, I tried, but I couldn't do it. The part of me that wanted her, I mean, really wanted her, hadn't come back yet. I thought that I had disappointed her when she came back out of the bathroom looking sexy as hell and smelling incredible but she just sat with me, like the incredible wife that she is. Seeing her so beautiful sparked a little bit of that feeling that I had forgotten, but not enough. The part of me that screamed anxiety was at full force, though.

Callie knew the old me, the Arizona from before. What if she didn't like the new Arizona I was building? I couldn't even look at my leg without wincing, how could she and still want me? She knew and loved the old me, and she thought that Arizona was coming back, but I was starting to realize that there was no coming back.

It took a few more weeks before I let her touch me. But, we worked through it. I felt like I had learned how to fake being the old me, the me from before, well enough that I could make it work. When she touched my leg, and then higher, and then even higher, I felt a bit of me pull itself from the ashes that I hadn't seen yet. The part of me that really, and I mean **really**, loved sex... especially sex with my insanely hot and gorgeous and incredible wife. But still, when she touched me, I felt like she was reaching down and touching the me from before; the woman that she fell in love with. And although I was working on building a new Arizona, I wasn't sure that the new me, the me that was living in the after, was that woman anymore.

It felt like everyone around me was living in an alternate universe that had somehow collided with my own; they were in the before and I was living in the after.

I looked around the hospital while standing at my favorite coffee cart, imagining the world if everyone was living in the after with me or if I was somehow able to live in the before for just one day. I sighed as I thought of how insanely happy that would make me, which only forced me to realize how sad I had become. Dreaming of a different world had become the way that I passed my time… when did that happen?

I dumped more and more sugar into my coffee until I heard a throat clear from beside me.

"I'm Lauren."

I glanced over and took in the sight of the rather beautiful blonde at my side. "…okay…"

"No, I'm Lauren… the coffee that you are currently way over sugaring, that's mine."

I looked down and realized my day dreaming had gotten the best of me. The coffee cup had 'Lauren' scrawled across the side in plain sight. "Oh, I'm so sorry…" I stammered.

She reached for the cup of coffee that had just been placed in front of me with my name written across the side and put it to her lips. I went to stop her, but she took a sip and then smiled at me in this way that sparked something deep within me… something new, something I couldn't quite name.

"Are you Arizona?" she asked.

I nodded with what I am sure was the dumbest looking grin on my face. "And that's mine," I added, pointing to the coffee in her hands.

"Well, now it's mine." Then that smile flashed again. "I'll see you around, Arizona."

As I watched her walk away, my stomach spun just a little and my breath quickened. This new feeling… what was it?

Lauren turned out to be the expert flown in to help with my current big surgery. It was different being around her; she was very flirty and beautiful and made it so I couldn't think. It was confusing being around her. I decided I was reading too much into her advances and that she was genuinely just a flirty person with everyone she met.

But then, I stepped into the elevator and she told me I had pretty eyes. And my stomach spun again and my heart raced and that feeling came back… the one I couldn't quite name. I had to stop this, this wasn't right. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach, I knew… this wasn't right. So I told her I had a wife and was happily married, because Callie had been so incredibly wonderful to me, and I knew that I had an obligation to her which meant Lauren couldn't talk to me like that. But then she already knew that I was married and that I only had one leg, and she still smiled at me in the same way, and I still got that feeling.

It kept going like that for the next day and all through the surgery and after. She knew me, it seemed like. She studied under the same professor as I did during my time at Hopkins, and she knew I only had one leg, she knew I was a mother, that I had a beautiful wife, and yet she still smiled at me that certain way that made me giggle like a school girl. She flirted with me non-stop, and something about it made me realize that this was the first time I felt like my 'after' universe was the one that someone else was living in. That I wasn't the only one.

She was there, she saw me, the whole me, the one I had built up from the ashes all on my own while everyone was begging for the old me to come back. She wasn't asking for the old Arizona, she was flirting with the new Arizona, and I felt like someone finally saw me; understood me.

So when the door closed behind us and the lights went out, I reached out to that person living in the same universe as me and we connected in a collision of sparks and flames; that feeling exploded and spun in a ravenous tornado in the pit of my stomach. I felt her lips on mine, but they were different, they weren't Callie's. Her hips were smaller, her chest was flat, she wasn't my Calliope. So I pushed away, I told her I couldn't do it.

And then those words rang through the room. "You can lose control every once in a while, you know."

I locked the door, and I threw everything in my mind aside. I forgot that these weren't Callie's hips, her hands, her lips… those were things from my 'before' and I was living in the 'after'. I had to. Because this feeling… this was new, and I needed it like I needed air after drowning for months in a sea of emptiness. Every new feeling was like another gulp of air that slowly pieced my crippled carcass back together.

I lay in the bed staring at the ceiling, the rough cotton bedding draped across my chest, counting the number of shattered cracks hanging above me. I could hear the wailing of the wind from outside and the rain pelting against the window violently. Lauren's soft snores cradled the silence permeating throughout the on call room. She was curled into a ball, her back to me so I had a clear view of the lines of red that I left clawed into her back. I could still feel the sting of her lips against mine, the ghosting presence of her skin brushing against me. Thinking of her hands tracing my body made my skin crawl and I suddenly felt that feeling again… the same one from before, and now I knew its name: Guilt.

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Thanks for reading!

Leave a comment if you liked it, and feel free to check out my other stories if you want.

Loves and stuff,

-Tina


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